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Palomas: A year aiding the poor

By Victoria Tester For the Headlight

Posted:
03/28/2011 12:00:00 AM MDT

(Editor's Note: The following is part one of a letter from Victoria Tester, who, throughout 2010, and now in 2011, works as a coordinator for the Palomas Outreach. Through this letter, Tester sets out to inform readers of the hardships endured in the suffering border town where large numbers of people are living without safety, work, a daily meal, running water, electricity, or the ability to send their children to school.)

La Luz de La Esperanza Palomas Outreach is a U.S. non-profit secular humanitarian organization operating for the past seven years on Buenaventura Street in Palomas, Chihuahua. It offers a daily meal program for seniors and the disabled, food distribution and health services to destitute families of the border town. The Outreach, founded and directed by Mexican-American Esperanza Lozoya, operates under the umbrella organization of the Andrew Sanchez Youth Center in Columbus, New Mexico, whose director Guadalupe Otero won a Robert Wood Johnson Award in 2003.

In January 2010, the Outreach pantry was down to its last few items, and only subsequent bean and rice donations to us from Diaz Farms in Deming saved many families in Palomas from starving. Apart from that, winter donations remained low.

Bad went to worse when Carl Fox of Christian Faith International Ministries withdrew his monthly donation of one hundred pounds of beans and rice when he visited our building in Palomas and saw that a visiting Anglican artist had painted the Virgin of Guadalupe on the wall of the small chapel provided for them in the Outreach building complex.

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Our goal at the Outreach is to serve the community without religious or racial discrimination. We are a rainbow of people at the Outreach, and we want to serve all the poor of the community.

We want to serve the needs of Palomas children across the board, including the children of families living outside any faith; the huge numbers of Catholic children and the Tarahumara children.

We wanted to implement a summer meal program for the children of Palomas. But we needed even more food, or the money to buy it.

Then in May - the dreaded month we knew school would end and a majority of children in Palomas would lose their only daily meal -- there was thankfully a turning point in awareness about the widespread hunger in Palomas. We accompanied El Paso reporters into Palomas under police escort in the town's only old police car. We continued on in Palomas' only ambulance, which the Outreach had restored from a vandalized shell and even operated for a while.

The atmosphere was tense as we crossed the border, walked and then drove through the small town. We found next to no one on the streets outside the area near the border gate.

The town looked strangely empty.

Then we found the people. Huddled in their homes. Children sat on old sofas set directly on dirt floors, without a single book, or toy. Opened refrigerators and cupboards were completely devoid of food. People were afraid to leave their houses. Most had no regular daily meal. One child considered his family lucky because his mother had a small bowl of eggs in an otherwise empty refrigerator. At his aunts' and uncles' houses, he said, they had nothing.

The El Paso news broadcast made a difference. More calls came in than before.

Still, we knew it wouldn't be enough to feed all the children who were going to lose their daily meal when school ended. We estimated that number to be at between 2,500 and 3,000 children.

Hunger, just across the border in Palomas, is mostly a problem of child hunger. There are only between 4,000 and 5,000 people remaining in the town, and we estimate that at least three-fifths of these are children.

Part 2 of Victoria Tester's letter will publish on Tuesday's Viewpoints Page of the Deming Headlight. To learn more about La Luz de La Esperanza Palomas Outreach, a secular humanitarian aid organization operating inside Palomas, Chihuahua, Mexico, and liaison for the Nuestra Senora de Guadalupe Catholic Parish of Palomas, visit:

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